Deep Analysis of Persuasion: Outliving the Storms of Autumn (Ch. IV - X) (Patreon)

The first ten chapters of Persuasion alternate between Shakespearean comedy and painful remembrance of things past.

We're talking about how Austen truthfully renders real life, the Romantic Sublime, the blessings of memory, and the difficulty of taking advice from those you love.

We're also examining how Austen pioneered the literary narrative technique of free indirect discourse and delighting in what we might affectionately dub the "Austen Aside".

Lecture Timestamps

• 0:00 a game to orient your reading
• 3:00 courtly romance and garden scenes
• 4:30 the value of rereading Persuasion
• 6:00 feeling the love between the lines
• 7:00 love vs alliance vs affection vs like
• 8:00 a short period of exquisite felicity
• 8:30 subtext and iceberg theory
• 9:00 where is your advice coming from?
• 10:30 “he had nothing but himself to recommend him”
• 12:30 blending the semantics fields of war and bloom
• 13:30 the irony overhanging the entire novel
• 14:30 an engagement of only a few short months
• 15:30 do you pity Anne Elliot? Austen?
• 17:00 how Austen expertly and truthfully renders real life
• 19:00 was Anne actually persuaded?
• 20:00 “such uncertain future good”
• 22:00 we the readers have the gift of hindsight, time, and distance
• 23:00 “all his confidence had been justified”
• 24:00 the recklessness of single men without dependents
• 25:00 the heartbreak below the surface
• 27:40 free indirect discourse and the “Austen Aside”
• 30:00 Austen, Goethe, Kafka, Flaubert, Cervantes
• 33:00 relative clauses and Proustian sugar cubes
• 33:40 reading the Great Works aloud
• 34:30 understanding characters by virtue of their counterpart
• 36:00 Austen, Wordsworth, and the Romantic Sublime
• 42:00 the Shakespearean tenth chapter
• 45:00 Anne overhearing Louisa and Wentworth
• 47:30 the blessing of memory, pain, poetry
• 48:30 proof of the depth of Anne and Wentworth’s love
• 49:00 is Persuasion a comedy?
• 51:00 outliving the storms of autumn
• 53:00 Anne is blessed with memory, Wentworth with strength

Extra (Optional) Poetry Reading Assignments

1) We read some of Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' during the course of this lecture. Why not treat yourself to the whole thing? We'll pull it apart together soon.

2) If you would like to foray further into Romantic poetry, you could try almost anything by John Keats ('To Autumn', 'Ode to a Nightingale', 'Ode on a Grecian Urn') and you would find the spirit of Austen in his heartbreaking verse. I am convinced that Keats read, relished, and learnt from Austen. 

The Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Blake) are all incredibly well served in the Pocket Poets Everyman series.

Let me know any thoughts you have on Persuasion, Anne Elliot, Captain Frederick Wentworth, pain, memory, the Austenite novel, or anything else that has captivated you during reading.

Happy reading!